Dick Morris�s political instincts are way off on this one. If you don't believe me, check out today's polling data from POLL TRACK. The numbers are changing. An astute political observer would have known the first numbers weren't going to tell the story.

When they say this, they are expressing their horror of profound disability, an emotion our pundits have given full voice to over the past two weeks. Morris, in his own selection of epithets: "non-life," "coma," "persistent vegetative state," "life not worth living" is just a rung below Hitchens, who referred to Terri Schiavo as a "non-human entity."

So yes, the vast majority of Americans think, "I wouldn't want to live like that."

But it seems that the vast majority of Americans, over the past 50 years, have also had their consciousness raised as to the value and dignity of a life with disability, including severe disability.

The vast majority of Americans, it seems, no longer believe that a person with a severe disability has a life "not worth living."

The vast majority of Americans admire and respect parents who love and care for a disabled child.

The vast majority of Americans do not want a husband who has moved on with his life to hold full property rights to the severely disabled wife he has left behind.

The vast majority of Americans do not want a county probate judge in Florida to have the power to order a helpless woman starved and dehydrated to death.

The vast majority of Americans certainly do not want a county probate judge in Florida to have the power to define water taken by mouth as an �experimental medical procedure.�

The vast majority of Americans, when push comes to shove, side with optimism and hope over fatalism and expert opinion. They don�t care if it�s false hope. They think hope is hope.

The vast majority of Americans, presented with a King Solomon's conflict between anguished parents who want their child to live and an adulterous husband who wants their child to die, are going to side with the parents.

And the vast majority of Americans do not want to stand by and watch the slow state-sanctioned starving and dehydrating of a helpless, voiceless woman as her family weeps and begs and pleads for her life.

They do not want policemen searching the dying woman's family and friends before they enter her room; they do not want policemen escorting the family from the building at the moment of their loved one's death.

I'd put money on it that after discovering just how long it takes to die of dehydration, just what it entails, a fair number of Americans are going to be taking a different view of that, too. We are already seeing this shift in the polls.

I�d put money on it that while the vast majority of Americans were inclined to think at the start of this that Michael Schiavo was a good guy caught in a terrible situation, they are now getting off that particular boat. The vast majority of Americans have had two weeks to witness Michael Schiavo's unspeakable cruelty to Terri's parents, and they know they wouldn't put their own spouse's ageing parents through what the Schindler�s have been put through. They know it's wrong.

The vast majority of Americans are not going to think well of a man who bans his wife's parents from her deathbed because a judge says he can.

And finally, the vast majority of Americans are religious to some degree. There's nothing in the Bible that tells me or anyone else that we should be the judge of Terri Schiavo's human value. That goes double for judges.

The Democrats just got played.

They allowed themselves to be seen to side with Michael Schiavo; they allowed themselves to be seen to be engaged in a fight to the death, the death of a terribly injured woman.

And then they allowed themselves to be seen to have won.

Dick Morris doesn't have a clue what just happened.